Ignoring the fact that pebble bed reactors have a bad safety record, I don't believe there is a single nuclear power plant in operation that isn't subsidised by the government. If nuclear power were economical I'd be interested, but the evidence is that you can have cheap or safe, but not both. Give me wind, solar and a reasonable program to wean off fossil fuels any day.
Actually, we probably can - Urine is readily digested by water microbes and is usually sterile. The mexicans grew crops in their sewage ponds until spanish invasion, and the system had been in place for maybe 1500 years. Our society has a rather strange aversion to our own bodily wastes, yet we willingly expose ourself to known carcenogens. Fascinating.
This is already true in Australia - My parent's Church can't sell electrical applicances in their fete due to lack of certification.
I wonder if it is a ploy by industry groups to increase 'consumer spending', i.e. stop people repairing old and force them to buy (cheap, shoddy) new stuff.
my $10/m^2 includes all the mounting hardware. The sheet itself is more like $0.5/m^2. You do need weather proof mounting and whatnot. I'm about to embark on a process of discovery using some evacuated tube collectors I bought this afternoon to see what tradeoffs there are between reflection and collector area.
cooling PV panels = keeping below 80C, high temperature superconductors might only work to 80C. I only corrected the GGGGGGGP because lots of people think that superconductors have an infinite carrying capacity and it seems bad for a faulty meme to continue to propagate...
Other possible reasons for stranded being better are: more surface area between copper crystal boundaries, larger diameter keeping the wire cooler, less stress when bent around corners. But these all seem to be second order effects and fairly insignificant. (I could be wrong) Stranded cable has a higher self inductance, which might increase the stress in the inverter.
In theory a DC conductor is smaller than an AC conductor for a given VA disipation in the cable. This is because of things like skin effect, but between DC and 50Hz I doubt it's worth worrying about. I know of no other reason that DC might be better than AC than the possibility of reactive loads on AC (which heat the wire more for a given amount of real power through the system).
The reason that a high volt system might have thinner wires for a given current (not power) is that the fusing current is far higher anyway, so we're really only concerned with ohmic loss, and a 1V drop at 240V is fairly irrelevant.
That's him! I agree the website is terrible:) Just been reading a book called 'permaculture' by david holmgren - you might find it very interesting. You might also consider solar heating your house - 3.5kWh/m^2 day is still a lot of energy, and a cheap 4x3 greenhouse might cost you $200 in materials for 42kWh/day (what's your heating bill like?)
What about those people like me who have both theoretical understanding, and years of practical understanding? I think there are actually three kinds of PV expert: those who do without understanding (wrenches), those who know without understanding (your average annoying and usually wrong usenet poster), those who know by doing the math, predicting the behaviour, building a test system and comparing performance. I claim that the wrenches are often just misguided and waste their(and their customers) money.
Stranded cables better practical performance is well known - most of it comes down to the fact that it is easier to make a good connection on the terminals. Joining a solid core to a terminal requires a close fit and careful soldering, stranded cable just requires enough pressure.
As far as "They've been doing it for decades, illegally, without encountering any of the problems that the theorists have convinced the regulatory authorities will surely result." is concerned, it's far more likely that the rules were made by someone who is neither a wrench, nor a theoretician. Instead, most regulations are designed by commitees whose main purpose is to make sure that their special product is required by law.
Using flattened copper pipe solves three problems that you didn't mention: the connectors are built in and thus don't have high resistance joints, copper pipe is much easier to obtain than equivalent area wire (and is soft annealed, making it more bendable) and copper wire is better cooled (due to the larger surface area). It might be interesting to use narrower pipe and put a small amount of water or LPG in the pipe under vacuum to act as a heat pipe to move heat from any hot spots quickly to the rest of the surface. I bet that even 1/4 refrigerant pipe would be fine for serious arrays (say 100A) and much easier to install, and cheaper to buy if 'cooled' this way.
Ohmic heating, however, is mostly a function of wire cross-section.
In my previous post I was talking about cheap solar systems, such as solar lights, solar pond pumps etc. I was not talking about 12V PV arrays. But to address your point, if you are using such a large thickness of cable, perhaps your system is poorly designed. A 1.5 kW array can use normal 12ga house-mains diameter wiring, with the panels operating at 140V DC. String arrays perform better with less wire too. If you foolishly designed a system where a large current is generated at a low voltage you deserve all the pain and expensive wiring you get.
You honestly believe that a $10/m^2 aluminized polyester sheet is not cost effective compared to a $800/m^2 PV array? The sunball man not only disagrees, but proves you wrong. The main problem with concentration is limiting the heat rise on the cells. sunball man uses heat pipes and a large aluminium heatsink, Nick Pine trickles a small amount of water over the surface, my parents use a heat activated, closed loop, sun powered lawn sprinkler. None of these systems show any problems after years of use, and I think doubling or tripling the energy produced for a small extra cost is quite an intelligent thing to do. Perhaps you sell solar panels?
Reflectors can also collect more hours of sun like heliostats, but without the movement.
Big commercial solar power stations use mirrors without exception.
The Bonobo (Pan paniscus), until recently usually called the Pygmy Chimpanzee and less often the Dwarf or Gracile Chimpanzee, is one of the two species comprising the chimpanzee genus, Pan.
They are chimps (yes they are apes too), they are in the Pan genus etc.
Critical current is nothing to do with cooling (there is no loss, remember, so no ohmic heating). At a guess (and I'm not an expert in this area) the critical current is due to the density of suitable electrons to form cooper pairs. Beyond the critical current more electrons appear than can be squeezed into the matrix.
I'm fascinated to understand what your distinction is between line loss and conductor sizing? resistive losses (the main problem in DC systems) are I^2R, so reducing the current buys a lot of smaller wire. (And I think you mean cross-sectional area, not surface area?)
Like all things in real-life (tm), there are tradeoffs in design. If a solar panel device requires 1mA maximum over 10m of wire, then a 1ohm/m cable (10ohms total) would 'waste' 10uW of power. Is it worth spending 10 times as much for 0.1ohm/m cable if there is more energy embodied in the copper in the cable than the device will ever use?
If you want to get more power out of a PV cell you should focus more light on it using a mirror, lens or white painted wall.
Sorry, I couldn't understand anything you wrote. Here are some corrections and my best effort to comprehend your point:
[T]here [has] always [been] paranoia about "declining communication skills". [Ed: So we haven't solved the problem yet.]
At the same time there are contradict[ory] studies [noting increasing] language skills. [Ed: Do you have a reference for this?]
Lang[ua]ge and usage [are overanalysed]. [Ed: Yet you are about to say that language is a fundamental skill. Should we focus instead on more effective strategies in Counterstrike?]
[L]anguage is what it is. [Ed: a meaningless statement in any case. Tofu is what it is too.]
[Language] is a method of communicating thoughts and ideas with others.
As long as we understand each other there is nothing "wrong" [-] we are[n't] devolving or whatever these people [claim]. [Ed: The problem is not the understanding per se, but ensuring the reader has the _same_ understanding]
[L]anguage exists because we created it for our benefit. [Ed: so what? Tofu exists because we created it too.]
People who can't accept that language evolves and branches off for different purposes are close-minded and ignorant to reality. [Ed: Or perhaps they wish to avoid muddied thinking due to poor language.]
To clarify your position:
* Language is really important. * Weird academic types get snooty when it is misused. But they don't agree so they're talking crap. * As long as other people can read all the words I use, there isn't a problem. * If you don't agree with me (or at least, with what I wrote), you're stupid and wrong.
Re:Middle east is a good place to start such proje
on
Space Tourism from UAE
·
· Score: 1
Sure, but rocket fuel is usually derived from the energy in crude oil.
Specialisation is an argument, it's a very strong argument, indeed, it's the basis of modern (agricultural) society. It is often not possible for a generalist to make something as efficiently or as efficient as a mass produced device - why don't you make your own computer, I bet that produces more CO2 and wastes more oil in its production and use than my (much heavier) bike? 100W for a year is equivalent to 100 gallons of oil in energy alone.
There is no point is me trying to hand craft a bike from scratch - I will waste far more resources (due to faulty designs, tooling up, chasing up suitable materials, taking small deliveries of parts) than buying a commercial one. If you were serious about your position you wouldn't have had time to post that message, as you would be too busy organising food.
Everything is non-renewable, as everything is powered by increasing entropy. One day the universe is going to coool down, and there'll be no more work, and there'll be no more heat. Yeah, that's entropy man. I don't care about using non-renewable resources, I care about using an unsustainable rate of non-renewable energy. If western (and developing) societies weren't so busy burning oil we'd have millenia of oil available, and most of what we used could be reused and recycled over and over. When my bicycle dies I'll probably use the steel frame for some project, or send the whole thing to a scrap merchant who'll recover 80% of the initial energy as new metal.
If you made a company that sold 100% sustainable (defined as say carbon neutral, 100% post-consumer recycled) bicycles with comparable features to a mass produced one, I'll buy one from you.
Finally, a bicycle is about 5 times as efficient as a person walking, even on compacted dirt. A human produces about 100W riding a bike, which would be equivalent to 500W walking at the same speed (or realistically, for 1/5 as long), Thus riding 1 hour each day corresponds to producing 0.4kWh (this is the same calculation people use for renewable energy). This means that me riding to work each day might produce 100kWh a year, equivalent to 11 gallons of oil made per year over walking.
Yes, it's worse for the environment to walk than to ride!
Superconductors also have a maximum current rating, google 'Critical Current Density'. Work out the current required for low voltage (even 120V) distribution and work out how big the conductor would be (then estimate the cooling cost and compare with normal line losses).
You're both talking nonsense: DC-DC conversion is standard technology, it's plausible that there are more DC-DC converters in your house than 50Hz transformers. Your computer power supply converts 450V DC to 5V DC.
DC is more efficient and more useful over long distances because you don't have a) inductive losses, b) capacitive losses, c) no need to synchronise phases at both ends. On the downside, you need an inverter at each end. AC wins in the complex medium scale networks that cover our cities.
Okay. But it's neither cheap nor easy to get gasoline in the middle of the brush in a country that doesn't use the largest military in the world to subsidize the price of gasoline.
It's easier to buy gasoline than pretty much any other fuel in most places. The exception is wood, and nobody makes a wood burning generator for $100AU. Get back to me when a biofuel powered generator is cheaper to own than a petrol one you can buy in a tool shop. I'll be the first to buy one! (Heck, I'll buy two for extra reliability)
And, in case you missed it, it's quite possible that worldwide petroleum production has already peaked. So that solution isn't getting any cheaper.
Yes, there's going to be an energy crisis. It seems hard to claim there has been a peak when none of us have accurate numbers to know this for sure and far too little time to measure it in. The price of oil seems to be doing its usual random walk.
Gardens for growing are a luxury everyone should have. The problem is that many people don't want to grow their own veggies, in which case maybe the land is better used at a higher density.
I don't know what the average farmland per person is, I recall it being something like 2ha per person in the US and AU. But that would include animal space and water catchment space and so on.
It's fairly easy to cogenerate heat and power using a $100 gasoline generator. If you use the waste heat (4* the electrical output), and feed the electricity back into the grid it works out quite economically. All you need is a cheap generator with an induction generator, some lights, some switches, a circuit breaker and a 5A multitap 24V transformer. If you can't see how to wire it, you probably shouldn't do it.
I put all my good code in open source projects. I means that I don't need to do as much maintanance, other people optimise it, it gets stored all around the net and [Ed: think of something warm and fuzzy about forming online communities or somesuch tripe].
I think Linus Torvalds once said that he doesn't need backups, as he has 10000 copies scattered around the net of everything worth keeping.
My suggested simple h-bridge GI inverter would most likely fail by killing the fuse and blowing the H-bridge, I can't see if going up in flames as there isn't much current to play with. Maybe I'm wrong - I'd have to build one to see...
I agree that using the inverter as a UPS is nice, which is why we used an SW3024. But that's not a realistic replacement for coal, whereas very simple inverters and simple configurations might be quite cost effective.
Yes, we have the SWCA interface, and I even wrote a perl script to download and upload on the configuration data (no idea where the code went).
Not only can you see the phase shift on an oscope, you can actually hear it with the grid (with a genny it's probably too hard to hear), it makes a sort of plinking noise as it rotates.
Feel free to email me if you want to discuss further - slashdot is a fairly poor place to have a chat;) also, jabber on njh@gristle.org
Actually, a family lived entirely off their own block last year in an experiment in queensland. Despite the worst drought in history they managed to pull through the entire year with a veggie patch, a goat, chickens, ducks and fruit trees in a 1/4 acre block.
We make all out own fruit and veggies (more because we're snobs that don't like commercial produce) from a 580m^2 block.
I bought a pack of 2 18W CFLs for $10 from coles a couple of years ago (Nov 2003), and they're still going fine. I don't know the power's like where you live, but we get a possum about once a month here. You can buy 5W CFLs from ikea for $5 in those big bins. The reduction in heating effect in summer makes CFLs even more reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
There's tidal energy too.
Safer than wind?
Ignoring the fact that pebble bed reactors have a bad safety record, I don't believe there is a single nuclear power plant in operation that isn't subsidised by the government. If nuclear power were economical I'd be interested, but the evidence is that you can have cheap or safe, but not both. Give me wind, solar and a reasonable program to wean off fossil fuels any day.
We can't pee in our drinking water forever. ;)
Actually, we probably can - Urine is readily digested by water microbes and is usually sterile. The mexicans grew crops in their sewage ponds until spanish invasion, and the system had been in place for maybe 1500 years. Our society has a rather strange aversion to our own bodily wastes, yet we willingly expose ourself to known carcenogens. Fascinating.
This is already true in Australia - My parent's Church can't sell electrical applicances in their fete due to lack of certification.
I wonder if it is a ploy by industry groups to increase 'consumer spending', i.e. stop people repairing old and force them to buy (cheap, shoddy) new stuff.
my $10/m^2 includes all the mounting hardware. The sheet itself is more like $0.5/m^2. You do need weather proof mounting and whatnot. I'm about to embark on a process of discovery using some evacuated tube collectors I bought this afternoon to see what tradeoffs there are between reflection and collector area.
cooling PV panels = keeping below 80C, high temperature superconductors might only work to 80C. I only corrected the GGGGGGGP because lots of people think that superconductors have an infinite carrying capacity and it seems bad for a faulty meme to continue to propagate...
Other possible reasons for stranded being better are: more surface area between copper crystal boundaries, larger diameter keeping the wire cooler, less stress when bent around corners. But these all seem to be second order effects and fairly insignificant. (I could be wrong) Stranded cable has a higher self inductance, which might increase the stress in the inverter.
In theory a DC conductor is smaller than an AC conductor for a given VA disipation in the cable. This is because of things like skin effect, but between DC and 50Hz I doubt it's worth worrying about. I know of no other reason that DC might be better than AC than the possibility of reactive loads on AC (which heat the wire more for a given amount of real power through the system).
The reason that a high volt system might have thinner wires for a given current (not power) is that the fusing current is far higher anyway, so we're really only concerned with ohmic loss, and a 1V drop at 240V is fairly irrelevant.
That's him! I agree the website is terrible :) Just been reading a book called 'permaculture' by david holmgren - you might find it very interesting. You might also consider solar heating your house - 3.5kWh/m^2 day is still a lot of energy, and a cheap 4x3 greenhouse might cost you $200 in materials for 42kWh /day (what's your heating bill like?)
What about those people like me who have both theoretical understanding, and years of practical understanding? I think there are actually three kinds of PV expert: those who do without understanding (wrenches), those who know without understanding (your average annoying and usually wrong usenet poster), those who know by doing the math, predicting the behaviour, building a test system and comparing performance. I claim that the wrenches are often just misguided and waste their(and their customers) money.
Stranded cables better practical performance is well known - most of it comes down to the fact that it is easier to make a good connection on the terminals. Joining a solid core to a terminal requires a close fit and careful soldering, stranded cable just requires enough pressure.
As far as "They've been doing it for decades, illegally, without encountering any of the problems that the theorists have convinced the regulatory authorities will surely result." is concerned, it's far more likely that the rules were made by someone who is neither a wrench, nor a theoretician. Instead, most regulations are designed by commitees whose main purpose is to make sure that their special product is required by law.
Using flattened copper pipe solves three problems that you didn't mention: the connectors are built in and thus don't have high resistance joints, copper pipe is much easier to obtain than equivalent area wire (and is soft annealed, making it more bendable) and copper wire is better cooled (due to the larger surface area). It might be interesting to use narrower pipe and put a small amount of water or LPG in the pipe under vacuum to act as a heat pipe to move heat from any hot spots quickly to the rest of the surface. I bet that even 1/4 refrigerant pipe would be fine for serious arrays (say 100A) and much easier to install, and cheaper to buy if 'cooled' this way.
Ohmic heating, however, is mostly a function of wire cross-section.
In my previous post I was talking about cheap solar systems, such as solar lights, solar pond pumps etc. I was not talking about 12V PV arrays. But to address your point, if you are using such a large thickness of cable, perhaps your system is poorly designed. A 1.5 kW array can use normal 12ga house-mains diameter wiring, with the panels operating at 140V DC. String arrays perform better with less wire too. If you foolishly designed a system where a large current is generated at a low voltage you deserve all the pain and expensive wiring you get.
You honestly believe that a $10/m^2 aluminized polyester sheet is not cost effective compared to a $800/m^2 PV array? The sunball man not only disagrees, but proves you wrong. The main problem with concentration is limiting the heat rise on the cells. sunball man uses heat pipes and a large aluminium heatsink, Nick Pine trickles a small amount of water over the surface, my parents use a heat activated, closed loop, sun powered lawn sprinkler. None of these systems show any problems after years of use, and I think doubling or tripling the energy produced for a small extra cost is quite an intelligent thing to do. Perhaps you sell solar panels?
Reflectors can also collect more hours of sun like heliostats, but without the movement.
Big commercial solar power stations use mirrors without exception.
The Bonobo (Pan paniscus), until recently usually called the Pygmy Chimpanzee and less often the Dwarf or Gracile Chimpanzee, is one of the two species comprising the chimpanzee genus, Pan.
They are chimps (yes they are apes too), they are in the Pan genus etc.
"Just don't call him a monkey."
"Oook"
They are chimpanzees, not monkeys.
Oook.
Critical current is nothing to do with cooling (there is no loss, remember, so no ohmic heating). At a guess (and I'm not an expert in this area) the critical current is due to the density of suitable electrons to form cooper pairs. Beyond the critical current more electrons appear than can be squeezed into the matrix.
I'm fascinated to understand what your distinction is between line loss and conductor sizing? resistive losses (the main problem in DC systems) are I^2R, so reducing the current buys a lot of smaller wire. (And I think you mean cross-sectional area, not surface area?)
Like all things in real-life (tm), there are tradeoffs in design. If a solar panel device requires 1mA maximum over 10m of wire, then a 1ohm/m cable (10ohms total) would 'waste' 10uW of power. Is it worth spending 10 times as much for 0.1ohm/m cable if there is more energy embodied in the copper in the cable than the device will ever use?
If you want to get more power out of a PV cell you should focus more light on it using a mirror, lens or white painted wall.
Sorry, I couldn't understand anything you wrote. Here are some corrections and my best effort to comprehend your point:
[T]here [has] always [been] paranoia about "declining communication skills". [Ed: So we haven't solved the problem yet.]
At the same time there are contradict[ory] studies [noting increasing] language skills. [Ed: Do you have a reference for this?]
Lang[ua]ge and usage [are overanalysed]. [Ed: Yet you are about to say that language is a fundamental skill. Should we focus instead on more effective strategies in Counterstrike?]
[L]anguage is what it is. [Ed: a meaningless statement in any case. Tofu is what it is too.]
[Language] is a method of communicating thoughts and ideas with others.
As long as we understand each other there is nothing "wrong" [-] we are[n't] devolving or whatever these people [claim]. [Ed: The problem is not the understanding per se, but ensuring the reader has the _same_ understanding]
[L]anguage exists because we created it for our benefit. [Ed: so what? Tofu exists because we created it too.]
People who can't accept that language evolves and branches off for different purposes are close-minded and ignorant to reality. [Ed: Or perhaps they wish to avoid muddied thinking due to poor language.]
To clarify your position:
* Language is really important.
* Weird academic types get snooty when it is misused. But they don't agree so they're talking crap.
* As long as other people can read all the words I use, there isn't a problem.
* If you don't agree with me (or at least, with what I wrote), you're stupid and wrong.
Sure, but rocket fuel is usually derived from the energy in crude oil.
Specialisation is an argument, it's a very strong argument, indeed, it's the basis of modern (agricultural) society. It is often not possible for a generalist to make something as efficiently or as efficient as a mass produced device - why don't you make your own computer, I bet that produces more CO2 and wastes more oil in its production and use than my (much heavier) bike? 100W for a year is equivalent to 100 gallons of oil in energy alone.
There is no point is me trying to hand craft a bike from scratch - I will waste far more resources (due to faulty designs, tooling up, chasing up suitable materials, taking small deliveries of parts) than buying a commercial one. If you were serious about your position you wouldn't have had time to post that message, as you would be too busy organising food.
Everything is non-renewable, as everything is powered by increasing entropy. One day the universe is going to coool down, and there'll be no more work, and there'll be no more heat. Yeah, that's entropy man. I don't care about using non-renewable resources, I care about using an unsustainable rate of non-renewable energy. If western (and developing) societies weren't so busy burning oil we'd have millenia of oil available, and most of what we used could be reused and recycled over and over. When my bicycle dies I'll probably use the steel frame for some project, or send the whole thing to a scrap merchant who'll recover 80% of the initial energy as new metal.
If you made a company that sold 100% sustainable (defined as say carbon neutral, 100% post-consumer recycled) bicycles with comparable features to a mass produced one, I'll buy one from you.
Finally, a bicycle is about 5 times as efficient as a person walking, even on compacted dirt. A human produces about 100W riding a bike, which would be equivalent to 500W walking at the same speed (or realistically, for 1/5 as long), Thus riding 1 hour each day corresponds to producing 0.4kWh (this is the same calculation people use for renewable energy). This means that me riding to work each day might produce 100kWh a year, equivalent to 11 gallons of oil made per year over walking.
Yes, it's worse for the environment to walk than to ride!
Superconductors also have a maximum current rating, google 'Critical Current Density'. Work out the current required for low voltage (even 120V) distribution and work out how big the conductor would be (then estimate the cooling cost and compare with normal line losses).
You're both talking nonsense: DC-DC conversion is standard technology, it's plausible that there are more DC-DC converters in your house than 50Hz transformers. Your computer power supply converts 450V DC to 5V DC.
s upply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_
DC is more efficient and more useful over long distances because you don't have a) inductive losses, b) capacitive losses, c) no need to synchronise phases at both ends. On the downside, you need an inverter at each end. AC wins in the complex medium scale networks that cover our cities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC
Okay. But it's neither cheap nor easy to get gasoline in the middle of the brush in a country that doesn't use the largest military in the world to subsidize the price of gasoline.
It's easier to buy gasoline than pretty much any other fuel in most places. The exception is wood, and nobody makes a wood burning generator for $100AU. Get back to me when a biofuel powered generator is cheaper to own than a petrol one you can buy in a tool shop. I'll be the first to buy one! (Heck, I'll buy two for extra reliability)
And, in case you missed it, it's quite possible that worldwide petroleum production has already peaked. So that solution isn't getting any cheaper.
Yes, there's going to be an energy crisis. It seems hard to claim there has been a peak when none of us have accurate numbers to know this for sure and far too little time to measure it in. The price of oil seems to be doing its usual random walk.
Gardens for growing are a luxury everyone should have. The problem is that many people don't want to grow their own veggies, in which case maybe the land is better used at a higher density.
I don't know what the average farmland per person is, I recall it being something like 2ha per person in the US and AU. But that would include animal space and water catchment space and so on.
It's fairly easy to cogenerate heat and power using a $100 gasoline generator. If you use the waste heat (4* the electrical output), and feed the electricity back into the grid it works out quite economically. All you need is a cheap generator with an induction generator, some lights, some switches, a circuit breaker and a 5A multitap 24V transformer. If you can't see how to wire it, you probably shouldn't do it.
I should introduce you to the basics of economics some time. Read about specialisation.
I put all my good code in open source projects. I means that I don't need to do as much maintanance, other people optimise it, it gets stored all around the net and [Ed: think of something warm and fuzzy about forming online communities or somesuch tripe].
I think Linus Torvalds once said that he doesn't need backups, as he has 10000 copies scattered around the net of everything worth keeping.
My suggested simple h-bridge GI inverter would most likely fail by killing the fuse and blowing the H-bridge, I can't see if going up in flames as there isn't much current to play with. Maybe I'm wrong - I'd have to build one to see...
;)
I agree that using the inverter as a UPS is nice, which is why we used an SW3024. But that's not a realistic replacement for coal, whereas very simple inverters and simple configurations might be quite cost effective.
Yes, we have the SWCA interface, and I even wrote a perl script to download and upload on the configuration data (no idea where the code went).
Not only can you see the phase shift on an oscope, you can actually hear it with the grid (with a genny it's probably too hard to hear), it makes a sort of plinking noise as it rotates.
Feel free to email me if you want to discuss further - slashdot is a fairly poor place to have a chat
also, jabber on njh@gristle.org
Actually, a family lived entirely off their own block last year in an experiment in queensland. Despite the worst drought in history they managed to pull through the entire year with a veggie patch, a goat, chickens, ducks and fruit trees in a 1/4 acre block.
We make all out own fruit and veggies (more because we're snobs that don't like commercial produce) from a 580m^2 block.
Let me just clarify: You don't mind 30% of 300 million amercians = 90 million SUV drivers, but the 130 million chinese are bad? Why?
I bought a pack of 2 18W CFLs for $10 from coles a couple of years ago (Nov 2003), and they're still going fine. I don't know the power's like where you live, but we get a possum about once a month here. You can buy 5W CFLs from ikea for $5 in those big bins. The reduction in heating effect in summer makes CFLs even more reliable.